Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Chick-fil-A has made ‘no such concessions’ to the homosexual agenda: Dan Cathy denies media reports

CHICAGO, September 24, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – After a Chicago alderman claimed last week that Chick-fil-A had agreed not to fund pro-family organizations, the fast food chain’s president Dan Cathy has set the record straight.

“Chick-fil-A made no such concessions, and we remain true to who we are and who we have been,” he said in a statement posted on Mike Huckabee’s website on Friday.

Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy.

Last week, First Ward Alderman Proco “Joe” Moreno, who has been opposing Chick-fil-A’s attempts to open a franchise because of Cathy’s traditional marriage views, claimed that the Christian business had agreed that its philanthropy arm, the WinShape Foundation, would no longer support organizations that oppose redefining marriage. The news was widely reported in the mainstream media as a major “victory” for the pro-homosexual movement.

However, the pro-family organization MassResistance told LifeSiteNews.com in an e-mail that a spokeswoman for the fast food chain specifically said the foundation would continue to fund the Family Research Council, Exodus International, Eagle Forum, and Focus on the Family, among others.

Moreno had held up the restaurant’s efforts to open a store in the Big Windy for 10 months.

“There continues to be erroneous implications in the media that Chick-fil-A changed our practices and priorities in order to obtain permission for a new restaurant in Chicago. That is incorrect,” Cathy said.

Huckabee, who organized last month’s record-breaking Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day, wrote that Cathy had provided the statement “to end confusion” that the Christian business had “capitulated” on its core values.

Moreno responded that the company’s apparent reversal “allowed us to move forward,” and Cathy’s statement “muddied the progress we had made with Chick-fil-A.”

Cathy’s decision to hold true to the values of his store, his family, and his religion may cost him the ability to do business in Chicago.

“I still need to introduce legislation to make the Chick-fil-A in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago a reality,” Moreno said. “I will wait to see what Mr. Cathy’s next PUBLIC statement is, and reflect on that statement before moving forward with appropriate legislation.” (Emphasis in original.)

Moreno will have the support of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who joined a series of public officials in saying the restaurant is persona non grata in its community. That earned a sharp rebuke from the city’s archbishop, Cardinal Francis George.

After Moreno went public with his initial report that Chick-fil-A had reversed its charitable giving policy, the restaurant chain issued a vague statement that it would finance “programs that educate youth, strengthen families and enrich marriages, and support communities,” rather than fund groups with “political agendas.”

However, the statement may reflect the fact that Chick-fil-A does not consider marriage to be a “political” issue. A similar stance was taken recently by Leadership Institute founder and conservative icon Morton Blackwell. For most of American history “abortion and monogamous marriage between one man and one woman were among the many settled legal and moral issues of American culture,” Blackwell said at the Values Voter Summit earlier this month. “But then the political Left began to bring into politics its hostility to traditional moral principles.”